‘Sophie Of Dundee’ Has Been Vindicated, But It Won’t Change Anything

Last August, there was a shocking news story about a 12-year-old Scottish girl who pulled a hatchet and knife on an immigrant in Dundee. A video clip of the hatchet-wielding girl, with other terrified and angry girls shouting at the man to leave them alone, went viral.

The story made international headlines. The girl in the video was dubbed “Sophie of Dundee,” and for some, she became a symbol of everything that has gone wrong in Britain: a working-class child in an impoverished, post-industrial city, harassed by a predatory migrant man, reduced to carrying crude weapons to defend herself, abandoned by the institutions and authorities that were supposed to protect her. The whole tragic story of Britain was contained in that one video. I wrote at the time that these kinds of incidents, and the refusal of political leaders to acknowledge or take them seriously, were driving Britain toward civil war.

But plenty of others, including many in the corporate press and even the police and political leaders in Dundee, saw nothing more than a group of racist little guttersnipes threatening a migrant man simply because of the color of his skin. Indeed, the police initially arrested the girl for carrying a bladed weapon and issued statements saying that what was being shared on the internet was wrong, that the migrant man and his adult sister were the victims, not the girls.

Powerful politicians and major media figures mocked the story of the girls being attacked by a migrant as racist “propaganda slop,” and those who spread the story as “far-right.” The entire intellectual establishment, reacting instinctively with classist prejudice, accused anyone who supported the girls as “scum.”

But it turns out the story was true. The man, a 22-year-old Bulgarian named Ilia Belov, has been found guilty of sexually harassing and assaulting the girls. His sister, 20-year-old Nadjedzha Belova, previously pled guilty to assaulting a 13-year-old girl “by seizing and pulling her hair, dragging her to the ground, and striking her on the head to her injury during the incident.”

All of this came out in court, where the judge heard that the man had approached the girls and said, “Hello, sexy, I’ll show you a good time.” When the girls rebuffed him, he called his sister, who arrived shortly afterward and attacked one of the girls. Amid that confrontation, “Sophie” pulled out the hatchet and knife.

Why didn’t the politicians and commentators and even the police initially believe the girls? Because they’re white and working-class, and the Belovs are minorities. Here again we see the same dynamic that played out in the recent murder of Henry Nowak: The authorities assume the white Briton must be guilty and racist, while the innocent racial minority must be telling the truth.

In the case of “Sophie,” there was the added class element, which should come as no surprise. Contempt for working-class Britons among the British elite has been a recurring feature of life in that country — especially in the context of the rape gangs, which disproportionately targeted working-class girls in cities like Dundee. The authorities often dismissed the claims of the girls and their families as racially motivated, when in fact they were true in every horrifying detail.

After the conviction, “Sophie’s” mother said, “They were telling the truth and they were slandered. There were too many lies at the start, so I’m glad it’s all come out.”

They should be glad the truth has come out, but they should not expect an apology from the politicians, journalists, and prominent public figures who slandered them and sided with the migrant predator. So far, nothing — not the rape gang scandal, not the murder of Henry Nowak, not even rioting in the streets of Belfast after an African migrant tried to behead a man in the street — has prompted Britain’s leadership class to reflect at all on why so many native Britons are staunchly opposed to mass migration.

And probably nothing will, which is why Britain is still marching down the terrible road to civil war. When war comes, Britain’s leaders, who have lost all legitimacy through their indifference to the wishes of native Britons, will be entirely to blame.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.